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Monthly Archives: July 2011

Recently I found out that, my Fast Search Center was not available from the “New Site” menu. Both the english as well the dutch fast search template was not available.

As I saw this happen before, I checked out the site collection features overview, to enable the “SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features”. I had to scratch my head twice when I saw that that feature was already activated: that feature should add fast search center templates to the available templates. Next thing I did was navigate to the “Page Layout and Site Template settings”, to make sure that the Fast Search Center template was available for creating sub-sites. To my surprise, the template was available! Still, I couldn’t select that template when creating a new site.

At the company i work for, we do have around 30(?!) different labels and we decided that all websites of those labels, should be hosted on one platform: SharePoint 2010. This consolidation to one platform should really decrease costs, because we now have one generic way of developing, one platform to take care of and we can reuse a lot of components. One of the service applications that we wanted to reuse amongst all applications, is the Fast Query Service Application, as we have a Fast instance running. Our labels are really enthousiast about the Fast Search for SharePoint capabilities due to fact that a lot of interesting features, like visual best bets, can be configured from within the UI. Other things, like new ranking models can easily be configured via powershell. There is just one index, with all public information in it: personal details or things like that, will not be indexed! By configuring scopes in a correct way, we can prevent information from label 1 to appear in the search results on label 2. If, for some reason, those results appeared by accident (wrongly configured scope), that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, as that can be fixed real soon.

When migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, it might be possible that your navigation is broken. The error I encountered was the following, but it can occur in more functions within the Navigation namespace.

Object Reference not set to an instance of an object. Stacktrace: at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteWebSiteMapNode.FetchDynamicItems(PublishingWeb pubWeb, NodeTypes includedTypes, Boolean& websFetched, Boolean& pagesFetched) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalWebSiteMapNode.PopulateNavigationChildrenInner(NodeTypes includedTypes)